Sunday, May 20, 2012

“Our
voting system weakens Canada’s cohesion. It artificially amplifies the regional
concentration of political party support at the federal level. With 50% of the
vote in a given province, a federal party could end up taking almost all the
seats. But with 20% of the vote, it may end up not winning any seats at all.
This is how Ontario appeared more Liberal than it really was, Alberta more
Reform-Conservative, Quebec more Bloc, etc.

Exaggerated regional
differences

Dion
says “This regional amplification effect benefits parties with regionally
concentrated support and, conversely, penalizes parties whose support is spread
across the country without dominating anywhere. A party able to reach out to
voters across the country is disadvantaged compared to another whose base is
only in one region.

“I
do not see why we should maintain a voting system that makes our major parties
appear less national and our regions more politically opposed than they really
are. I no longer want a voting system that gives the impression that certain
parties have given up on Quebec, or on the West.”

Preferential
voting (AV/IRV) won’t help

The Liberal Party of Canada voted in January
2012 to support preferential voting (also known as the Alternative Vote, or
Instant Runoff Vote). However, Dion now says “Preferential voting . . .
does nothing to correct the distortion between votes and seats and the
under-representation of national parties compared to regional ones. Other
changes are needed to find a voting system that best fits the Canadian
context.”

So I
checked the 2011 election results to see if Dion is right. On the votes cast in
May 2011, would preferential voting (the “Alternative Vote” or “Instant Runoff
Vote”) do anything to fix the problems he's dismayed by?

To get voters’
second preferences, I used the EKOS poll of “which party
would be your second choice” taken April 28-30, 2011.

AV/IRV
would have cut them down to four MPs. Jacques
Gourde would have lost to the NDP, thanks to second choices of Bloc and Liberal
voters.

That’s
because AV hurts third parties, and in Quebec, the Conservatives and Liberals
have become the third parties.

Liberal
voters in the West are badly under-represented, where they elected only four
MPs, not the 11 MPs their voters deserved. According to my spreadsheet, would
AV have let them elect more MPs?

Not in BC:
second choices would not make any BC seat change hands.

Nor in
Alberta: same result.

Not in
Saskatchewan, although Liberal and Green second choices would have elected NDP
candidate Noah Evanchuk in Palliser.

In
Manitoba NDP second choices would have let Anita Neville hold onto Winnipeg
South Centre.

In
provinces where we already saw three-way races, AV would make a few seats
change hands.

Stéphane Dion is right

But as to his
very justified concern, exaggerated regional differences, Stéphane Dion is
right: AV would do nothing to help. In fact, it would hurt more than it would
help.

Dion says "There are also Conservatives in Quebec, traditionally "blue," particularly in the regions, who are entitled to be heard. Despite my Liberal allegiance, I am convinced that the general interest requires that Quebec’s Conservatives be able to make their full contribution to the building of Canada alongside Conservatives from elsewhere in Canada. I want a federal voting system that fully honours Quebec’s rich political culture, of which we are rightfully proud."

But he is right: AV will not do this. It's not even a step in the right direction; ask Jacques Gourde.

“Our voting system weakens Canada’s cohesion. For Canada,
the main problem of this distortion effect is that it artificially amplifies
the regional concentration of political party support at the federal level.
With 50% of the vote in a given province, a federal party could end up taking
almost all the seats. But with 20% of the vote, it may end up not winning any
seats at all. This is how Ontario appeared more Liberal than it really was,
Alberta more Reform-Conservative, Quebec more Bloc, etc. During all the years
that the Bloc dominated Quebec’s representation in the House of Commons, they
never received a majority of votes from Quebec.

“This
regional amplification effect benefits parties with regionally concentrated
support and, conversely, penalizes parties whose support is spread across the
country without dominating anywhere. A party able to reach out to voters across
the country is disadvantaged compared to another whose base is only in one
region.

“My main concern with all this is national cohesiveness,
even national unity. I do not see why we should maintain a voting system that
makes our major parties appear less national and our regions more politically
opposed than they really are, favouring regional parties at the expense of
national ones concerned with reconciling the regional interests of our vast
country. I no longer want a voting system that gives the impression that
certain parties have given up on Quebec, or on the West. On the contrary, the
whole spectrum of parties, from Greens to Conservatives, must embrace all the
regions of Canada. In each region, they must covet and be able to obtain seats
proportionate to their actual support. This is the main reason why I recommend
replacing our voting system.

“. . . Thus, seats would be truly up for grabs in all
ridings, even in the most Conservative ones in Alberta and the most Liberal
ones in Toronto and Montreal.

"Canada is a diverse country. So in the interest of national cohesion, it is preferable that national parties not be at a disadvantage compared to those with most of their support lying in a single region.

". . there are many other voting systems. In fact, ours
is far from being the preferred method in other democracies. It can hardly be
found anywhere except for the United States and the United Kingdom (but not in
Scotland or Wales).

Seats do not match
votes

Dion
notes “the major problem with this voting system: the way it distorts the
results between votes and seats. This distortion is often significant, creating
enormous gaps between the number of seats won by the parties and the number of
votes received. There are even times when the party that won the most seats and
formed the government did not even receive the most votes. This has occurred in
the provinces (three times in mine) and in the 1979 federal election.

“This
distortion effect is particularly difficult to accept when a majority government
elected by a minority of voters forces the country on an ideological course
that is contrary to the preferences of the majority.

“Sometimes, this distortion effect ends up depriving the
opposition parties of enough seats to be able to function properly. In one
instance in New Brunswick, the opposition did not win a single seat!

“Canada is a diverse country. So in the interest of
national cohesion, it is preferable that national parties not be at a
disadvantage compared to those with most of their support lying in a single
region.

“Of all the democracies, Canada’s Parliament is one where
women are not as well represented as they should be. We need a voting system
that helps correct this under-representation and promotes adequate minority representation.

“Like so many other democracies, Canada has seen a drop
in voter participation in the last few years. A new voting system is required
to help us curb this rise in abstentions.

“Preferential voting isa
step in theright
direction.” But he explained this at the Fair Vote Canada Conference May 26: it
is a foot in the door within the Liberal Party to start the discussion on
electoral reform. He knows preferential voting has never led to proportional
representation anywhere in the world.

Dion
is open to other formulas

"I
may not have come up with the best formula, and I do keep an open mind.
However, it is in this spirit that we need to work to improve our democracy. .
. My hope is that the LPC, and all other political parties on Canada’s federal
scene, will one day adopt these views, if not the proposition that I submit for
discussion."

These points are more important than the
details of his unusual model.

Dion’s model: Swedish-style list PR with small regions
Dion advocates Swedish-style list PR, but with small regions like Spain's but
even smaller. You elect between three and five MPs from multi-member districts,
with some exceptions like northern seats, but generally, as close to five as
possible.

He wants open lists like Sweden, and with small regions this would
be very feasible. You would have two votes: one for a party, one for a
candidate on the party list.

Also, he wants voters to rank the parties with a preferential
ballot. Not STV, where a surplus is transferred; just preferential. A party
would be dropped from the count in favour of your second choice party if it
didn't get enough votes to elect someone in your small district.

He writes “It would produce a fairly meaningful
proportional representation that greatly reduces the distortion between votes
and seats as well as regional amplification, but at the same time is moderate
enough to avoid a proliferation of parties and retain the possibility of a
majority government formed by a single party.”

Let’s see if that is true.

1.The regional amplification effect continues

Liberal voters in the West have been robbed
of their voice by winner-take-all for 40 years. Last May the four western
provinces elected 72 Conservatives, 15 New Democrats, only four Liberals, and
one Green. A normal proportional system, such as the one recommended by the Law
Commission of Canada, would have let Western voters, on the votes cast in 2011,
elect 51 Conservatives, 26 New Democrats, 11 Liberals, and four Greens.

I did a simulation with Dion’s model on the
votes cast last May, with 73 districts as close to five as local geography
allows. (My projection is based on the second choice
data from an EKOS poll taken April 28-30, 2011.) In the West, Dion’s model would have helped the top two parties, not the Liberals:
57 Conservatives, 30 New Democrats, only five Liberals, and no Greens at all,
not even Elizabeth May on the votes actualy cast in 2011 (but she would have attracted more regional votes).

Dion writes
“Despite
my Liberal allegiance, I am convinced that the general interest requires that
Quebec’s Conservatives be able to make their full contribution to the building
of Canada alongside Conservatives from elsewhere in Canada.” Yet he proposes a model which, in his small districts,
on the votes cast in 2011 would likely have elected only one more Conservative
MP, 6 MPs, instead of the 12 their vote share should give them. Conservative
voters in Greater Montreal were especially silenced by winner-take-all: zero MPs
when they deserved four. Dion’s model would give Greater Montreal Conservatives
only one MP.

Liberal voters in Quebec were also robbed
last May: they elected only seven MPs, when their vote share deserved 11. Dion’s
model would have given Quebec Liberals only one more MP. But Quebec’s second
party, the Bloc, would have flourished: 18 MPs.

2.Why not
MMP?

Dion sets uppure proportional
representation with no regions (Netherlands and Israel) as a straw man – “I
would prefer to keep our voting system rather than adopt pure proportional
representation” – while never once
mentioning the Mixed Member Proportional option recommended by the LawCommission of Canada, by the Charest government in Quebec in 2005, by the New
Democratic Party, by
the Mouvement
pour une démocratie nouvelle, and
by Dion himself in 2006.

Dion notes the advantages of having a local
MP with “a
riding where they were elected, to which they are accountable and on which they
depend for their re-election.” But only 45% of Canadians live in cities as big as
Regina, Saskatchewan which has 193,000 people.

Yet Dion proposes a model which would
deprive 55% of Canadians, those who live in single-MP communities, of a local
MP, unlike the Law Commission’s model.

Dion notes that, in the Netherlands and
Israel, “voters lose “their” MP and “their” riding. They vote only for party
lists.” Again, he never mentions that the Law Commission’s model lets voters
vote both for a local MP and for a candidate on a regional list, not just for a
list. And he never explains why he has changed his mind.

3.Small districts.

If we had used
province-wide totals with full proportionality the results on the votes cast in
2011 would have been 126 Conservative, 94 New Democrats, 59 Liberals, 18 Bloc,
11 Greens.

In Dion’s model, due to his
small districts, I calculate the results as 128 Conservatives, 115 NDP, 47
Liberals, 18 Bloc, 0 Green (but likely 1 Green, and likely 1 more Liberal).

He says “The party that gets
the most votes in a riding would probably win three seats out of five or two
out of three.” Indeed, based on the
votes cast in 2011, I project more than half of the 73 districts – 44 districts
– elect members of only two parties. In 20 three-seaters, we find a 2:1 result 19
times out of 20. In 18 four-seaters, only seven are divided between three
parties. Even in the 34 five-seaters, 13 of them elect members of only two parties,
and the party with the most votes wins at least three out of five seats 59% of
the time.

Dion says his model is “moderate enough to avoid a
proliferation of parties and retain the possibility of a majority government
formed by a single party.” Indeed; it favours the top two parties.

Dion’s preferential
ballot would help Liberal voters in Ontario, letting them elect them 11 more
MPs, still five less than they deserved. Yet Dion’s model would cost Liberal
voters four MPs in other provinces, compared with who they elected last May. Not
even one from Saskatchewan; even in a Regina-Estevan five-seater on the votes cast in 2011 the Liberal
Party would have been eliminated after the second count with 0.85 quota.(Except that Ralph Goodale would no doubt have attracted more votes from the wider area, still winning a seat.) One
less in Nova Scotia, one less in Newfoundland and Labrador, and one less in PEI.
Only one Liberal MP from Alberta. Only one more from Quebec, one more from Manitoba,
one more from New Brunswick, one from the Yukon, and one from Labrador.

Not even one Green MP. Vancouver
Island has six MPs, which have to be two three-seaters. Dion uses the Droop quota. In a Victoria
three-seater the quota calculation would have been:

So the three MPs for Victoria
would have been two NDP, one Conservative, on the votes cast in 2011. (In reality, May would have attracted more votes from the rest of Victoria, and would have still been elected.)

Charest's 2005 Quebec proposal
This is not the first time a Liberal in Quebec has proposed a
"moderate" small-region model. It's what Charest's government
proposed in 2005. He proposed an MMP model with five-MNA regions (three local,
two regional.) Except in rural areas it would be three-MNAs (two local, one
regional.) Pretty similar.

They held public hearings in 2005-6, by a joint committee: a
Select Committee of the National Assembly sitting together with an 8-member
Citizens' Committee (an excellent consultation model, by the way.)

The superb Report
of the Citizens' Committee reflected the public
reaction: such a small-region model was not sufficiently proportional to
"reflect the diversity of ideas that exist in Quebec society."
"In concrete terms, the actual threshold for entry into the National
Assembly could be between 13 and 17%. Given that one of the objectives of
reform is to ensure effective representation of the electorate in terms of
equality of votes, this threshold is far from being acceptable."

4.Preferential party
ballots

Dion’s
small districts need a preferential party ballot to help prevent a Conservative
false majority. A party would be dropped
from the count in favour of your second choice party if it didn't get enough
votes to elect someone in your small district. If a party gets less than 16% of the vote in a five-seat district, those
votes will transfer to those voters’ second choice. Therefore, he calls it his “P3 model (proportional-preferential-personalized).”This
is not as good as Irish STV, because there are no surplus transfers.In Ireland, in a five-seat district, if a
party wins more than enough votes for two MPs but not enough for three, the
first step in the counting process is to transfer the surplus to those voters’
second choice, so that no votes are wasted and every vote counts equally. For
example, the Green Party in Ireland used to elect 6 MPs with only 4% of the first
preference votes because it got a rich harvest of transfers from being the
frequent second choice on ballot surpluses.

In
73 of his small districts with 304 MPs, my projection shows 12 districts where
the preferential ballot changes the local outcome.

In
five districts where the Conservatives and NDP split the seats, Liberal second
preferences push the NDP ahead for an extra seat: five-seater Windsor-Sarnia, four-seater
Niagara, five-seater Simcoe—Muskoka, five-seater Edmonton North, and
three-seater Nanaimo—North Island. Similarly, in five-seater Quebec City, the
outcome would be NDP 2, Conservatives 2, Bloc 1, until Liberal second
preferences give the NDP a seat from the Conservatives. Similarly, in four-seater Montérégie-ouest the NDP and Bloc would have elected two MPs each until Liberal
second preferences give the NDP a seat from the Bloc. In three districts the
Liberals are just short of a quota for a seat -- four-seater Durham Region, five-seater
Southwest New Brunswick, and five-seater Longueuil -- until Green second
preferences (and in Longueuil Conservative second preferences) push them over
the quota. Similarly, in two districts the NDP gets a seat only after picking
up Green second preferences: five-seater Mississauga, and five-seater Halton—Guelph. In special single seats, NDP second preferences give the Liberals MPs in Labrador and Yukon.

Still,
in 61 districts the preferential ballot made no difference.

5.Strategic voting is
alive and well

Dion writes
“. . . voters should be allowed not only to rank parties by
preference, but also to select a candidate. They would choose the candidate
they prefer from among those put forward by the party they select as their top
preference. In other words, voters would choose only one candidate in the party
of their first choice.”

To vote
for a candidate, you must make his or her party your first choice. If your
second choice counts, it counts for a candidate you had no voice in ranking. If
you don’t expect your first choice to win a seat – like almost all Green Party
voters – you will be tempted to vote for another party in order to be allowed
to rank a candidate. Who said strategic voting was dead?

6.Referendum?

He writes “Precedent
makes holding a referendum necessary in Canada: changing the voting system
would require popular support. To get this support, Canadians must be presented
with a voting system that provides them with better influence over the
political system.”

The 55% of Canadians who live in single-MP
communities will mostly vote against Dion’s model since it would cost them a locally-accountable
representative.

Note that Charest’s government was ready to
introduce PR in Quebec without a referendum, and the NDP is ready too. The Law Commission recommended
"The federal government should prepare draft legislation on a mixed
member proportional electoral system as proposed in this Report. After drafting
the legislation, a Parliamentary committee should initiate a public
consultation process on the proposed new electoral system."

Assumptions

Of course, these projections assumes voters voted as they did in
2011. In fact, if voters knew every vote would count, more would have voted --
typically at least 6% more. And some would have voted differently, perhaps 18%
of them by one study. No more strategic voting. We would likely have had
different candidates -- more women, and more diversity of all kinds. Who knows
who might have won real democratic elections?

So Dion's "moderate" model might be good for the Greens after all, if
they got more votes. Anyway, it's a vast improvement over winner-take-all. But by
having no local MPs, it would be much less appealing in single-MP communities than the
Law Commission's MMP model.

About Me

Although I am a member of Fair Vote Canada's Council at the federal level, the views expressed on this blog are my own.
I have been a lawyer since 1971, an elected school trustee from 1982 to 1994, past chair of the Board of the Northumberland Community Legal Centre, and so on.